ALICE COOPER

Alice Cooper
By Doug Van Pelt


Even though our cover story on Alice Cooper took up an unprecedented 7 pages, the 1.5 hour long interview occupied 9,400 words and the printed story was 4,600 words. If you're like me and you realize that you didn't get to read the entire interview, you'd be curious to see more. We will endeavor to give you bits and pieces of the interview as it happened. Here  is our first installment.

How is your handicap in your golf game?"You know, I'm actually playing better than my handicap right now. I'm a 6 handicap, but I've been shooting right around 4. I'm trending down. I've just been playing very steady  recently. I've got all the big tournaments coming up, so I don't really want to be playing really well . . . right now it's okay to play really good, but I need about two weeks of really playing horrible before the tournament, and then take a week off and then come back in fresh. You never want to go into those tournaments thinking you're playing good."

Does being fresh really make a difference? "Yeah, it really does. I play almost six times a week. Sometimes, after church on Sunday, my son and I will go out and play 9 if there's nothing else going on, so sometimes seven times a week. But, the deal is, if you play that much, sometimes you get really sloppy. You start getting to the point where you forget. You're playing so much that you're just going through the motions without really playing. So, sometimes it's good to go ahead and take three or four days off, forget all about it and come back in to the game."

I guess that's really a different level. "It really is. You have to get away from it for a while."

How involved were you with the 5.1 Surround mix of the Billion Dollar Babies DVD Audio? "Well, you know, I'm not technically right there with all that stuff. I honestly, to me, I'm the writer, and I'm a little bit old school when it comes to that. I believe that more bands today need to spend more time learning how to write, rather than worrying about the techno part of this thing. You've got engineers and producers that know all that stuff. The guy that's actually playing the guitar or writing the lyrics should spend a lot more time sitting around trying to work a melody line in a lyric together.  Just with a pad and paper and a small little tape recorder. That's really where the songs come from. I hear too many bands today that are . . . they write good riffs, but I mean, a lot of it's based on pure anger or frustration or angst. Maybe it has a good chorus, and I go, 'Yeah, but a song is not just a good chorus. You've gotta have a good chorus, you've gotta have a good B- section.' When young bands come to me and say, 'What should we do?' I say, 'Well, you've got a great look. You've got a great attitude. You've got this, this...' I listen to the music and I go, 'Where are the songs?' "'Well, here, this one's called 'I Hate My Mother,' and this one's called  'Blah, blah, blah...' And I say, 'I understand that you're angry. Even if you're angry, at least write a good song about being angry. Don't just scream it at me. After a while I get a little tired of being yelled at.'"

How do you feel about the outcome? Have you played it on a 5.1 Surround system? "Oh yeah, it sounds great! But I expect it to. That's what these guys are paid to do. These guys are paid to sit down and really make these things sound great. I'm glad that that's not my job, though. I'm glad that my job  is writing the material and  recording it, and not making it sound good. A lot of bands I know . . . Frank Zappa was very much into the technical thing of it. I think a lot of bands do get involved in that. That's not necessarily the point. The point is to write a good song and let those guys take care of that."

Do you feel like the Brutally Live DVD captured the Alice Cooper live show? "Yeah, as much as it can. I mean, I don't really think, when you're trying to put the sound of a huge guitar that you hear on stage or the drums that you hear on stage - or just the powerful way it sounds on stage - when you're trying to get that through an 8-inch speaker in a car, you're never gonna catch that. So, as well as you can, I think that they catch it. I think that they do okay. You're never ever gonna catch that bigness. You're kind of confined to these speakers. In fact, when we used to mix a record, we would never listen to a record through the big JBL's and all these great big woofers and tweeters and everything. We would mix the record and then play it through a 2-inch or 4-inch car speaker - one. 'What does it sound like through there?' Because that's what people are going to be hearing. The technical guys are really good at that. We don't get much involved. I hear it on stage, of course, and I can hear if something's wrong or out of balance, and I'll go over and say, 'You know what? That guitar is so distorted that we're missing the point. I want it to be distorted, but I don't want it to be so distorted that we miss the point of this thing. I still want to hear the notes.'"

Have you received any feedback from the mothers of those boy band members that you blew up in the "Gimme" video? (Laughs) "No, but I understand that the band is still together. The fact is they actually were a boy band. They were trying to be a boy band. They had a very good sense of humor about it. I told him, 'You know, everyone is trying to be The Backstreet Boys. Everybody is trying to be *NSYNC.' I said, 'What about a gothic boy band?' I said, 'Nobody's done that. This  silliness that we put you in, with this goth thing, may actually be a great look. It's certainly better than that candy-coated thing that they do.' I know The Backstreet Boys and I know *NSYNC and they're very, very professional. These guys are very good at what they do. They rehearse more than we do, and we rehearse a lot. I give them a lot of credit. I'm not crazy about the music at all. It's not my kind of music, but I give them a lot of credit for being professional."

I read a recent interview with you, where you talked about taking your band to see those bands, just to show them how hard working they are and how tight they perform.

"Yeah. There is such a thing as, you know, you get a lot of the metal bands, a lot of the alternative bands, and the goth bands and they've got this great attitude, and you get onstage and they're one-dimensional. I tell them,  'You know what? You could do ten different things. The first band like you that takes it three or four different levels is gonna do really well.' But, you know, they don't wanna work at it. They would rather just do what's expected. You get up, you jump up and down. You do the hip-hop thing up and down. And you do that one move that every single one of those bands make and you're happy with that. I say, 'I don't know. I wouldn't be satisfied with that. I would take it another step.' But that's what the Alice Cooper show has always been. We've always taken it the next step."

©2002 HM Magazine - All Rights Reserved.

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